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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Keynes's "Economic Consequences of the Peace" on Scribd

"A general bonfire is so great a necessity that unless we can make of it an orderly and good-tempered affair in which no serious injustice is done to anyone, it will, when it comes at last, grow into a conflagration that may destroy much else as well."--John Maynard Keynes, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" (1920)

A followup to my previous post, about Scribd: after coming to it via DeLong's blog, I created an account on Scribd, which I just revisited now. I had "favorited" a few documents..one of which is John Maynard Keynes's 1920 book, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace"--all 131 pages of it:

I had favorited it not only because Keynes is obviously in the news a lot these days (see this collection of links I put together a few months ago), but more specifically because Robert Shiller pointedly chose a passage from this particular work of Keynes as the introduction to the book he published last year.

In fact, now that I look at what I wrote in that entry about Keynes in December, I'm seeing I closed with the following:

A general bonfire is so great a necessity that unless we can make of it an orderly and good-tempered affair in which no serious injustice is done to anyone, it will, when it comes at last, grow into a conflagration that may destroy much else as well.

Consider why Shiller chose that passage (and that was back ~March 2008), and consider how our current economic conflagration has grown since then...

In fact, I was reminded of this after reading David Brooks's quite bitter column from last Saturday's NYT, titled "Perverse Cosmic Myopia"; here are the closing sentences:

Many people used to wonder how the world’s leaders could be so myopic at various points in history — like during the Versailles Treaty or the turmoil of the 1930s. We don’t have to wonder any more. We get to watch the cosmic myopia replay itself in our own times.